We're talking about diversity in the skeptical community again, this time occasioned by some unfortunate and ignorant comments from Michael Shermer about atheism and skepticism being "a guy thing", which drew a...

All throughout this year, I've been hearing people excitedly claiming that December 21, 2012, one week from today, will be the date of some major world event. Amusingly, the many New Age authors who've written...

Summary: A personable, good-humored example of the liberal-theist cherry-picking ethic.
I recently wrote about the evangelical writer Rachel Held Evans and whether her book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, can...

This article was originally published on AlterNet.
The renowned physicist Max Planck once said, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather...

In an interview late last month, Republican senator Marco Rubio, who's widely viewed to be laying the groundwork for a 2016 presidential run, announced that he doesn't know how old the Earth is:
I'm not a...

In my previous post on "Southern Slavery As It Was", I cited two modern-day Christian pastors who claim that black slavery was a positive and beneficial institution. To throw some cold water on their rosy claims,...

This weekend I saw Lincoln, which was a tremendous movie. Daniel Day-Lewis gives a compelling performance as President Abraham Lincoln during the closing days of the Civil War, when he battled with a fractious...

Hemant Mehta has just published a new book, The Young Atheist's Survival Guide. It's about the growing and increasingly important demographic of atheist high schoolers - their trials and travails, the opposition...

The 2008 elections, in which pro-gay-marriage campaigners won a sweep at the ballot box, is a clear sign that the tide of society is shifting in favor of equality. We've known for a long time that this was coming,...

[Editor's Note: Please welcome guest blogger Andrew Tripp, author of Considered Exclamations and president and co-founder of the DePaul Alliance for Free Thought, a Secular Student Alliance and Center for Inquiry...

Ireland's Catholic bishops have released an official statement on the death of Savita Halappanavar, to my surprise. It may well be that the outcry was so great, they felt obligated to respond. If so, it would be a...

My latest column has been posted on AlterNet, 50 Reasons to Boycott the Catholic Church. In it, as you might have guessed from the title, I list fifty arguments for why the Roman Catholic church is a thoroughly...

After several days, the fragile ceasefire in the latest iteration of Israel and Gaza's endless war is still holding. But while the bombs were falling, there was no shortage of voices calling for the battle to be...

Some progressive Christian bloggers I respect have been writing enthusiastically about a new book, Rachel Held Evans' A Year of Biblical Womanhood, which they say proves that the Bible has been misused to justify...

Earlier this week, I answered a set of "tough questions" posed to advocates of reproductive choice. Well, turnabout is fair play.
Although millions of religious people want abortion to be outlawed, they're...

In an article on the Gospel Coalition website, a Christian writer named Trevin Wax asserts that anti-choice politicians are held to a higher standard than pro-choice ones. He lists ten "hard questions" that he...

So, I've decided to sign up for Skype after getting several invitations to use it for speaking gigs. (Apparently, sometime when I wasn't paying attention, this became a thing that everyone has.) I don't really...

Following up on my post about the preventable death of Savita Halappanavar due to anti-choice theology, three Catholic blogs at Patheos have weighed in: "Savita's tragic death could have been avoided", "Savita's...

Savita Halappanavar is dead, and she shouldn't be. That has to be the beginning and end of anything anyone writes about this.
Savita was 31 years old, married, four months pregnant with her first child, a...

This past weekend, I was in Springfield, Missouri for Skepticon V ("the fifth most annual Skepticon yet"). I had such a fantastic time at Skepticon IV in 2011, it was a foregone conclusion that I'd go back this...

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